In recent years, robotics is evolving from its mechatronics roots, to explore the advanced functionalities offered by complex applications. We are entering a new robot software age. Unfortunately, nowadays, developing an application for a robot is more similar to craftsmanship than engineering. An all-around robotics expert with a combined knowledge about the application, the capabilities of the platform, and the underlying framework is required to guide the design and development process. This work aims to provide a collection of methodologies, techniques and tools to support all the actors involved in the development process of a robotic system. For the system designer, we provide a modelling approach to design, build and analyse the robot architecture. For the component developer, we created a code generation toolchain, which removes the burden of implementing framework-related boilerplate. For the application developer, we designed an abstraction layer on top of the robotic platform, it decouples the robot from its capabilities, creating the equivalent of robot APIs. All these contributions are built for a single purpose but using self-contained technologies, hence they are, at the same time, independent and part of a continuous design and development process.

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